Energy conservation

As a company in an increasingly energy-intensive business, we’re always looking for new ways to reduce our energy consumption and stabilize costs.

We have joined RE100 and have pledged to The White House’s American Business Act on Climate. As a part of these actions, we have committed to five ambitious goals that will help contribute to a low-carbon, sustainable future. This includes an aggressive, long-term goal of powering our operations and the digital delivery of our products entirely with 100% renewable electricity by 2035.

Adobe believes we will only achieve these ambitious goals if we work together. In order to share best practices and collaborate with peers, Adobe is a member of many business and industry groups and actively collaborates in the U.S. Green Building Council’s Building Health Initiative, Net Zero building and BSR’s Future of Internet Power to further our commitment to efficient workspaces and to provide our products to customers with minimal or no environmental impact.

Measuring and managing energy use

We recognize that we can’t manage what we can’t measure. So we’ve developed and implemented a monitoring system that captures energy and critical operations data based on thousands of data points, from electricity, water and natural gas usage to the power usage effectiveness (PUE) of all Adobe data centers. In our San Jose, California, headquarters alone, we collect energy usage and critical operations information for more than 30,000 data points.

We measure and report Scope 1 and 2 carbon emissions at our buildings, as well as Scope 3 emissions for purchased energy for our leased sites and for employee business travel. This information is calculated annually and is reported to CDP; this report is posted on Adobe.com. We acheived the CDP highest score of 100 in 2015.

Reducing energy demand

Since 2002, in our nine owned North American facilities we’ve completed more than 180 energy efficiency projects that have reduced electricity use by 50 percent, natural gas use by 30 percent, domestic water use by 79 percent and irrigation water use by 71 percent.

Our first Adobe built, owned and operated data center came online in November 2013 (LEED Gold). We selected the site in Hillsboro, Oregon, due to its low carbon energy mix, low climate risk location and potential for renewable energy implementation. This decision has helped us to incorporate evaporative cooling and other innovations to reduce our energy use and subsequent carbon emissions.

On-site power generation

To meet our energy needs, we invest in alternative and renewable energy sources that generate on-site power at our facilities. In 2009 we installed 20 Windspire wind turbines at our San Jose headquarters, which capture the energy of the wind speeding up as it flows between our three office towers.

In 2014, we became the first Fortune 500 company to install and manage an energy intelligence system from Stem. The advanced energy storage and real-time data analytics system in our San Francisco office will automatically respond to spikes in the building’s electricity use, drawing on previously stored power to reduce our energy costs without impacting operations.